Solomon Krieg shut off his flames and frowned deeply, as though concentrating on some difficult problem. Fat sparks of static electricity appeared spontaneously around his head, like a halo of electric flies. They spat and crackled, growing fiercer and more powerful, and then struck out at Mr. Stab like a hammer blow of unleashed energies. The blast picked him up and threw him twenty feet or more before slamming him into a concrete wall with devastating force. The whole wall crumbled into ruin under the impact, burying Mr. Stab under a pile of rubble. Solomon Krieg, the Golem with the Atomic Brain. He turned to me and I braced myself. Once I would have trusted my armour to protect me even from such an attack as this, but after the incident with the elf lord’s arrow, I wasn’t as confident as I once was. I still stood my ground. I was all that stood between the three women and Krieg’s atomic blast.
And that was when the escaped prisoners fell upon Krieg like a pack of howling wolves. Humans and inhumans, demons and creatures of the night, they fell upon their common foe and sought to drag him down through sheer weight of numbers. Claws and fangs tore his colourless flesh, but no blood flowed. Krieg swayed under their attack but did not fall. He lashed out with his machine-driven arms, throwing dead and broken bodies this way and that with appalling strength, not yielding an inch. More prisoners came running from every direction, desperate for a chance to drag down their hated jailer and executioner.
While Krieg was safely preoccupied, I hurried over to search the rubble for Mr. Stab, but he was already rising to his feet, entirely unhurt, fussily brushing dust from his coat and opera cloak. He stooped down to retrieve his top hat and placed it on his head at a jaunty angle. He might be the worst serial killer in history, but the man had style. He looked around him at the block of concrete pens and shook his head firmly.
"No. I will not stand for this. I am no stranger to the joys of suffering and slaughter, Edwin, but this…There are some things a gentleman just doesn’t do."
And he went with me among the cells, helping release those who couldn’t free themselves. The werewolves and the vampires and the like. It went against the grain for me to free such vicious and deadly creatures, after years of hunting them down and killing them, but I couldn’t leave them here. For the ovens. As Mr. Stab said: some things are just beyond the pale.
We left the demon half-breed where he was, of course. We weren’t stupid.
We came back from the concrete pens to find Solomon Krieg still standing, surrounded by the bodies of the dead and the fallen. Girl Flower threw herself at him, screaming something obscene in old Welsh. Atomic forces erupted from the golem’s scarred forehead, hitting Girl Flower and blowing her apart into a shower of rose petals. They churned and circled in midair, and then transformed, becoming a razor storm of a thousand cutting owls’ claws. They hit Solomon Krieg like a deadly hailstorm, ripping and tearing at his pale flesh, but still he stood his ground and would not fall. I might have admired him, if I hadn’t hated him so much. (The ovens never grew cold…) The razor storm finally collapsed, exhausted, and I went forward to do battle with the Golem with the Atomic Brain. I needed to punish someone for what had been done here, and he would do. I try hard, but sometimes I’m not a very nice person.
The creatures of the night fell back as I strode through their midst. They recognised the golden armour. Solomon saw me coming and smiled again. His face was hanging in tatters from scratched and scored bone after Girl Flower’s attack, and one eye was just an empty red socket, but still he smiled. He didn’t bother with his built-in gun or flamethrower. Just stepped forward and threw a punch with all his mechanised strength behind it. I heard the bones in his hand break as his fist glanced harmlessly from my golden mask. I grabbed his arm with both hands before he could draw it back and broke it over my knee like a piece of kindling. Bits of shattered tech flew out of the gaping wound. Solomon Krieg grunted once, but that was all. I let go of his arm and grabbed his head, pulling it down and forward. He fought me with all his legendary strength, but it wasn’t enough. Atomic forces sputtered and shimmered on the air as he struggled to put an attack together. I ripped the top of his head right off, tearing along the old scarred fault line on his forehead, and then reached into his head with my other hand and tore his atomic brain out.
I held it in my golden hand for a moment, studying it, that nasty triumph of Cold War technology, and then I dropped it on the ground and stamped on it. The brain shattered into a thousand pieces, and Solomon Krieg’s empty body fell twitching to the floor. I walked away, and the creatures of the night fell upon the body, tearing it to pieces in a frenzy of rage and revenge.
And that was when a spatial portal opened in the air before us, and an army of black-uniformed Manifest Destiny soldiers came pouring through, opening fire with automatic weapons the moment they caught sight of us. Bullets ricocheted from my armour, but I couldn’t shield everyone. Newly freed prisoners fell screaming and dying all around me. I grew golden spikes on my armoured fists and charged into the midst of the coming soldiers. I struck down men and women as they tried their best to kill me, and they did not rise again. But more and more soldiers were spilling out of the portal, their faces alight with the fury of the true fanatic. I broke necks and heads, and threw men and women through the air with deadly force, but still more of them streamed past me like a river around a single rock.
I fought on. It felt good to be striking them down. Manifest Destiny had betrayed me by not being the hope I’d so desperately needed.
Mr. Stab stepped forward to stand at my side, a long scalpel gleaming thirstily in his hand. Nothing the soldiers did could touch him, and he cut down all who came within his reach with an elegant disdain. Standing in the midst of blood and slaughter, he was in his element at last. Creatures of the night, hurt and weakened as they were, fought fiercely with the black-clad soldiers, and everywhere there was blood and screaming. Step by step we slowed the soldiers’ advance, and step by step we drove them back. Perhaps because their fanaticism was no match for our fury. We forced our way forward, over their dead and ours, until finally the surviving soldiers turned and fled back through the spatial portal, and it was shut down from their end.
I stood among the dead, in my blood-spattered armour, and raised one spiked fist in triumph. And all around me the creatures of the night howled their triumph and my name.
Molly yelled my name again and again until finally I lowered my fist and looked at her. "Eddie! We have to get out of here! Truman must have emergency contingency plans for a mass breakout, and I really don’t think we want to be here when he puts them into effect."
I nodded and strode over to her, kicking black-uniformed bodies aside. Blood and gore dripped thickly from my hands as I made the spikes disappear. My breathing slowed, and my head cleared. Mr. Stab walked beside me without a drop of blood on his elegant outfit.
"I know you want Truman dead," said Molly. "I do too. But there’s no way we can reach him right now."
"Agreed," I said. "His time will come. Any suggestions on what we do next?"
"I open a spatial portal of my own, and we all get the hell out of here and scatter into the night."
"Sounds like a plan to me," I said. "Where’s Girl Flower?"
"Oh, she’ll put herself back together again, over the next few days, in some place where she feels safe." She looked at Mr. Stab. "Can I trust you to look after Sue? I have to stick with the Drood. We have revenges to plan."
He inclined his head graciously. "Of course, my dear. She will be safe with me. You have my word on it."
And strangely enough, I believed him. I didn’t think he’d lie to Molly. He offered Subway Sue his arm, and she leaned on it gratefully. Molly opened a spatial portal, and we rushed the surviving prisoners through it as fast as we could. I kept glancing around, ready for another sneak attack, but it never came. The great cavern remained as silent as a mass grave. In the end, only Molly and I were left.
"So now we have two mortal enemies on our trail," I said. "M
y family, and Manifest Destiny. This day keeps getting better and better. Is there anyone left we can trust?"
"Maybe," said Molly. "A few names come to mind. But even if it was just you and me, I wouldn’t back down or cry off. I will have justice, even if I have to kill everyone else in the world to get it."
"You know," I said, "you’d have made a good Drood."
"Now you’re just being nasty," she said.
We left through the portal, back up into the cold clean air of London town.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sleeping with the Enemy
Molly and I emerged from her portal exactly where I’d asked her to drop us off: at the Greenwich docks, just down from that grand old sailing ship, the Cutty Sark. Dawn was breaking, the early morning air deliciously cool and clear after the unhealthy atmosphere of Manifest Destiny’s holding pens. Long crimson streaks stained the lightening sky, standing out starkly behind the tall masts of the Cutty Sark naval museum. I looked up and down the stone wharf, but the docks were deserted. And quite right too; normal people were tucked up in bed by now, and I had every intention of catching up with them as soon as possible. It had been a long day, what with one thing and another.
"You bring me to the nicest places, Eddie," said Molly. "Can I ask what the hell we’re doing here, where even fallen angels would fear to tread without armed bodyguards and a written guarantee of safe passage?"
"Greenwich is really very civilised these days," I said. "Practically gentrified, in some places. I keep a barge tethered here, with all the comforts and necessities of home. Another of my safe places, when I need somewhere off the beaten track to hide from everyone, even my own family."
"They don’t know about this barge?"
"They never asked. My family never cared how I did what I did, as long as I did what I was told. This way."
A few minutes’ stroll down the wharf brought us to my barge, the Lucky Lady. Just another among a couple of dozen longboats and barges tied up to the wharf. A fairly inexpensive way to live in an expensive part of London. You get a lot of actors here…The Lucky Lady bobbed heavily in the dark tarry waters, her colours a bright racing red and green, and all her brasswork shining in the amber light of the streetlamps. (I have a little brownie creature who comes around every other week and keeps the old boat spotless in return for my leaving out a bowl of single malt whiskey. I believe in upholding the old traditions. Especially when it means I don’t have to get down on my hands and knees with the Duraglit. Hate polishing brass.)
I would have preferred to take Molly back to my nice flat in Knightsbridge, but I didn’t dare. My family knew about the flat. At best they’d have agents in place, watching and waiting in case I was stupid enough to show my face. At worst, and much more likely, they’d have already torn the flat apart looking for clues or incriminating documents leading to where I was and what I might be doing. I knew the procedure. I’d done it myself often enough. Well, let them look. I never left anything of value in my flat. Or anywhere else, really. A field agent has to be ready to walk away from anything, at a moment’s notice, and never look back. We’re not allowed to be sentimental or form attachments. Our only roots are in the family. The family sees to that.
I said as much to Molly, and she nodded.
"They probably smashed up all your good stuff, just out of spite. I’ve seen how your family operates. Are you sure there’s nothing there they can use to track you? I could find you anywhere, just from holding some object that once belonged to you."
"Not as long as I wear the torc," I said. "My armour shields me from everything."
I handed Molly down onto the deck of my barge, and then stepped lightly down to join her. Molly looked at me thoughtfully.
"Your armour comes from your family. Are you sure they don’t have some secret way of finding you through the armour?"
"Positive. That’s always been our strength and our weakness. The same armour that makes us so powerful also isolates us from everything else in the world."
"So you’re always alone?"
"Yes. That’s why so few Droods can cope, out in the world. Away from the all-embracing arms of the family. Come on, it’s cold out here. Let’s go below."
I opened the hatch and down we went into the sumptuously furnished interior of the Lucky Lady. Wherever I live, I like to live well. I won the barge several years back in a poker game with a down-on-his-luck private detective. Poor bugger ended up living in his own office. Served him right for trying to cheat. There’s nothing I enjoy more than out-cheating a cheat. I can produce extra aces from places you wouldn’t believe.
I bustled around the long living area, lighting the old naval storm lamps and adjusting the wicks, filling the barge’s interior with a warm golden glow. Molly oohed and aahed over the luxurious furnishings, and positively cooed over the period details. The Lucky Lady has no modern conveniences, no electricity. The whole point of being on the barge was to be cut off from the modern world. (There is a chemical toilet. And a portable CD player. There’s no point in being a fanatic about these things.) Finally we both settled ourselves on the comfortably padded chaise longue, and I relaxed for the first time in what seemed like forever.
"I like your place, Eddie," said Molly, tucking her legs up under her.
"It’s so not you. A bit solitary, though."
"That’s the point," I said.
She considered me seriously. "I can’t imagine what it must be like for you, to live a life so alone…so cut off from everything and everyone. Never able to trust anyone who isn’t family."
"Comes with the job," I said. "And after growing up in a hall bursting at the seams with family, I was glad to get away."
"Has there never been…anyone else? Anyone who mattered?"
"No. Never. I can’t get too close to anyone without telling them what I do. And the family doesn’t allow that. Marriage, even…friendships, only take place at the family’s discretion. They have to be approved. Especially for those of us out in the field and open to the world’s temptations. From the moment we’re born, and they clap the golden torc around our infant throats, we belong to the family, body and soul. I live alone, wherever I live, and though I may invite people in to visit me from time to time, they’re never allowed to stay. For their own safety."
"So…no girlfriends? No significant others? No real friends? What kind of a life is that?"
"A life of service, to a greater cause," I said. "That was what I believed. What I’d been taught. How was I to know it was all a lie?"
"Is there anything here to eat and drink?" Molly said, kindly changing the subject. "I could eat, if you had something."
"Of course," I said. "Let me just knock some weevils out of the hardtack."
I set about organising a basic cold meal out of the tins I keep in stock, and opened the bottle of brandy I keep for medical emergencies. Molly busied herself by looking over my collection of CDs and making disparaging comments about my taste in music.
"What is this? No Hawkwind, no Motörhead, not even any Meat Loaf? Just…Judy Collins, Mary Hopkin, and Kate Bush…"
"I like female vocalists," I said, coming in with a tray.
"All right, I’ll lend you some of my Within Temptation imports. You’ll like them. They’re a Dutch band with a magnificent female vocalist. A bit like ABBA on crack."
"Well," I said. "There’s something to look forward to."
We attacked our food with good appetite. Molly wolfed hers down, to my quiet approval. I can’t stand people who pick at their food. Afterwards we sat together with the brandy warming in our bellies, companionably close, still too buzzed from the day’s adrenaline to sleep just yet. So we talked about old times, old cases, where we’d always been on different sides and doing our best to kill each other, as often as not. There are some things you can only talk about with old enemies. Because you had to be there, to understand.
The case of the millennium upgrade was a classic foul-up of almost legendary proportions.
My family got word that a rather eminent German scientist was about to defect from Vril Power Inc., in Munich, and had come to London to sell the fruits of his research to the highest bidder. That put it in my territory, so I was sent in to make sure that his work went to someone the family approved of. Or to shut the scientist down, with extreme prejudice, if he didn’t feel like cooperating.
We don’t normally get that excited over industrial espionage, but Herr Doktor Herman Koenig worked at the cutting edge of the computer–human mind interface and had apparently developed a means of direct contact between human thought and computer capacities. Theoretically, this could result in a combination of the two capable of producing a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. An awful lot of people were prepared to pay an awful lot of money for exclusive rights to such a process, so it was up to me to ensure that only the right sort of person got their hands on it. Or make sure no one did. My family can be very dog in the manger about some things.
Doktor Koenig had set up a makeshift laboratory in a disused government think tank in the old Bradbury Building, just down from Centre Point. Breaking in was child’s play. I was used to the kind of security that throws a demon from Hell at you if you get it wrong. Electronic locks and motion detectors aren’t really in the same league. Herr Doktor hadn’t even shelled out for some armed guards, the cheap bastard. Really, some people deserve everything that happens to them.
I let myself into the Bradbury Building lobby a good three hours before the auction was due to start and made my way easily up through the quiet building. Everyone else had gone home, oblivious to the drama to come. I armoured up and trotted easily up the forty-four flights of stairs to the doktor’s floor. (Never trust an elevator.) I didn’t expect any serious opposition on this case.
I didn’t know Molly Metcalf was already in the building.
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